


Sticky Rice for the Soul

by irinokat



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Boneslums, Comfort Food, Food, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 12:11:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4136997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irinokat/pseuds/irinokat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hong Kong Boneslums are a dangerous, unfriendly place, but for Mako, the little things can make the place feel... well, almost like home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sticky Rice for the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Shatterdome Atlanta 2015 Fanfic Slam! It was a lot of fun. We were given random prompts drawn out of a bag - two characters, a place, and a word/idea/abstract to work with. Mine were Hermann Gottlieb, Mako Mori, the Boneslums, and nostalgia. Coming up with ideas for that was pretty interesting, to say the least. All the stories that came out of the slam were fantastic and I'm happy to have participated. (I won an award for Best Setting and Sensory Details!) (Also, thanks so much to irisbleufic for helping with title and summary ideas, and for being an excellent judge, panelist, and roommate at Shatterdome. :D)

Mako walks down a sidestreet, listening to what she can hear above the _thunk_ of her boots on the pavement, head tilted low, eyes scanning from side to side. She tied a bandanna around her head this morning that covers her blue streaks, but it's hard not to feel conspicuous here. Hong Kong and South Korea were the hardest places to visit after Pentecost had adopted her, always being seen as the lone Tokyo survivor, the last -

 

She shakes her head and keeps walking, looking for the salvage shops that have popped up here, just a few streets away from Reckoner's temple. It makes her feel a little bit sick inside to think of where the owners found their junk, their electronic guts spilled and ripped from abandoned hardware, their scrap metal and machinery foraged from what's left behind. Trading in the stuff just doesn't feel right this close to the remains of another kaiju, a reminder that this area was once as devastated as the places the scavengers crawled through in their search for something worth selling. But she needs parts for her projects, and the PPDC's suppliers just haven't come up with what she requires so here she is, feeling just a little bit like a cannibal for looking at the pieces of lives lost in these shops.

 

It takes a few hours and a lot of haggling in her decent Mandarin and semi-coherent Cantonese, but she manages to find what she needs and get out with a small amount of cash in her pocket. She should probably just go back to the Shatterdome - in fact, she knows she should. Marshall Pentecost told her that the slums are no place for a teenager alone but if she just couldn't stop herself, to only go exactly where she needed and head straight back. But she's a Jaeger pilot candidate now and she knows what she's doing - surely it won't hurt to look around a bit. She gets to leave the Shatterdome so few times a year, and so rarely by herself when she does...

 

She must admit, it's better off the sidestreets and dark alleys, but it's still a bit nerve-wracking to walk down the Spine, main street of the slums, through crowds of people she doesn't know. She's not comfortable even in the mess halls at full capacity, and the intentions she reads into the faces around her makes her pull her bandanna lower, hoping that no one recognizes her. Maybe she should just go home. She's not looking for trouble, just for something fun, something good, something -

 

Something that smells delicious. She stops, blinks, takes another deep breath. Above the scents of sweat and skin, aromas from street vendors fill the air, selling skewers of glazed chicken, bowls of hot noodles and rice, buns and treats, more foods she can't even begin to name just from the mix of smells. She follows her nose as far as she can, trying to identify one that tickles her.

 

When she was a child, her parents would take her into town to do the weekly shopping, her father's hand occasionally pushing her shoulder to keep her walking next to him, her fingers slipping in and out of her sister's hand. She doesn't remember much about it anymore, tries to forget, honestly, but one of these smells is just so familiar... There's no way the stall she's looking for is owned by the family she knew as a child, there's no way it carries the grilled fish and octopus dumplings she hasn't eaten since she turned ten, but something draws her, calls to her, smells and almost tastes like home and like that stall that they ate at nearly every week.

 

She's snapped out of her reverie by a familiar tapping sound - not her boots, not shoes at all, but the metal end of a cane pushing into the ground and popping up again, much faster than anyone expects. She turns, her curiosity tinged with dread. Surely it's someone else, plenty of people in the world use canes, but no, she knows that pace too well. "Doctor Gottlieb?" she asks, though she already knows it's him, dipping her head to him and bobbing back up. Her hands immediately reach for the bandanna, hoping none of her hair slipped out of it.

 

"Miss Mori?" Gottlieb asks. He doesn't sound incredulous or accusatory upon finding her, just curious. Instead of grabbing her shoulder the way the Hansens and Dr. Geiszler and many of the other Shatterdome personnel do, he simply returns her little bow with a nod of his own. "Out for shore leave as well?"

 

All she can think to say is "Yes, sir." She really would rather not admit that the Marshall has no idea she's here.

 

"Perhaps you could help me find a bakery I've heard about." Dr. Gottlieb's mouth turns down in an annoyed frown that she knows could only come from thinking of his lab partner. "I was told it was somewhere around here, but the directions I was given were abysmal and I am making no headway."

 

Mako shrugs. Dr. Gottlieb tends to be quiet, at least, and kind to her. He might be a liability if someone recognizes that they're PPDC or decides their wallets are worth taking, but at the same time, she can't help but feel a bit safer around someone who practically helped raise her.

 

Dr. Gottlieb peers into every window they walk past, studying sticky buns and rice candies. He stays quiet, but the lines in his forehead grow ever deeper as they walk along, clearly frustrated by their inability to find the place he's looking for. By now the smell has disappeared from Mako's nose. She knew it was silly to try to find it anyways, considering that seafood prices are far too high for street vendors to sell it and octopus has been nearly impossible to find for years, but she still wishes she could at least have tracked down that smell. Maybe they at least used the same sauces or the same grilling techniques on some other meat. As she wonders how the fishy, salty sauce would work with pork, she hears Dr. Gottlieb shout, "Ah!"

 

Mako looks up, worried someone's grabbed him - but no, Gottlieb is perfectly safe, staring into a window hungrily, almost sadly. She comes up behind him, looking into the display. The tiny place's selection is meager, but the sweets are all unfamiliar to her. She can't understand the Chinese kanji on the label, so she looks at the poorly written English next to it, reading out, "Dah-mish."

 

"Danish, actually," Dr. Gottlieb says, a sigh heavy on his voice. "That's baklava next to it, and - millefueille, maybe? Strudels, I think that's a take on Sachertorte..." With a long breath, he pulls himself away from the window. Mako glances at the prices, gulps, and steps back as well. She might be able to afford one of the less expensive treats if she dug out all her change from the bottom of her pockets and her bag, but it wouldn't be worth it, and even with Gottlieb's salary, she can tell he can't bring himself to spend that much on one danish.

 

After walking back in the direction of the Shatterdome for a few minutes, Dr. Gottlieb said, "I knew it would be too good to be true when Dr. Geiszler mentioned a European-style bakery would be opening here, but still..." He falls silent again. Now he's completely ignoring the stalls and eateries around them, so lost in his own thought that he even barely moves out of the way of people in his path. Mako's never seen him so distracted, so - so down.

 

She spies a small stall selling Thai food and quickly winds her way toward it. It's not much in comparison to whatever Gottlieb is remembering, but seeing the noodle dishes and sticky rice still makes her smile - Dr. Geiszler was the first person to make her try his take-out pad Thai, and Gottlieb would occasionally share his noodles with her as well, saying something so sweet wasn't appropriate for dinner. She digs out enough coins for a small, disposable bowl of sweet sticky rice and takes it back to him. He waves it away at first, but when she hands him a fork, he doesn't turn it down. They stand there for a moment, taking in the sights and sounds, happy for the tiny piece of familiarity in a spot still so alien to them both.


End file.
